Leopard Gets Its Spots in October

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Mac users have been waiting on Leopard for several decades, if you’ll forgive my hyperbole, and they’re going to have to wait a bit longer. Originally, Leopard (OS X 10.5) was slated to hit the shelves and Macs this Summer. The iPhone, however, has gummed the works. According to an email sent to key developers and vendors:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

So, October. Sorry, ROCKtober. No Leopard for you at the WWDC (unless you’re cool). There you go, friends, see you then.